But in his recent book The Fate of Rome, Kyle Harper gathers a large amount of evidence to show that a series of pandemics caused immense damage and played a crucial role in weakening the Roman Empire, not just in absolute terms but also relative to the neighboring “Barbarians.” This is because, although the term “Barbarian” is problematic in that it lumps together an incredibly diverse set of communities into one indistinguishable and supposedly inferior mass, all these groups tended to have one thing in common: they lived in much less-populated and less-connected societies than the Romans.
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